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And when the big, brown bumping beetles, with hard, shiny wing-covers on their backs and soft, fuzzy velvet underneath, flew out at dusk, twenty or thirty of them, as likely as not, would make a luncheon for Mis the clown. For he was lean and hungry, and he ate and ate and ate; but he never grew fat. He hunted zigzag through the twilight of the evening and the twilight of the dawn.
That this is the case is attested in the first place by the two assaults of which I was perchance the witness; on two occasions, in broad daylight, I saw the female devouring the male, having opened the abdomen under the wing-covers, or having at least attempted to do so. As for the rest of the massacres, although direct observation was lacking, I had one very valuable piece of evidence.
Scott sniffed: "Didn't you know we had a few living species around here? Regular scarabs. Kathleen and I found three the other day one a regular beauty with two rhinoceros horns on the thorax and iridescent green and copper tinted wing-covers. Do you want to help me hunt for some more? You'll have to put on overshoes, for they're in the cow-yards."
It is unfortunate that he did not consider such cases as the minute teeth, which never cut through the jaw in the ox, or the mammae of male quadrupeds, or the wings of certain beetles, existing under the soldered wing-covers, or the vestiges of the pistil and stamens in various flowers, and many other such cases. Although I greatly admire Prof.
But it is conceivable that the now utterly lost branchiæ might have been gradually worked in by natural selection for some quite distinct purpose: in the same manner as, on the view entertained by some naturalists that the branchiæ and dorsal scales of Annelids are homologous with the wings and wing-covers of insects, it is probable that organs which at a very ancient period served for respiration have been actually converted into organs of flight.
By what steps the more simple apparatus in the Achetidae originated, we do not know, but it is probable that the basal portions of the wing- covers originally overlapped each other as they do at present; and that the friction of the nervures produced a grating sound, as is now the case with the wing-covers of the females. Mr.
The wing-covers, where they exist, instead of being expanded, are applied so closely to the body as to detract nothing from its rounded form, and hence the name which they have acquired of "walking-sticks." Like the Phyllium, the Phasma lives exclusively on vegetables, and some attain the length of several inches.
Landois also found such rudiments on the under surface of the wing-covers of the female Achetidae, and on the femora of the female Acridiidae.
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